Decoding Love Read online

  Another study found that the attitudes of students who had not analyzed their relationship with their partners were actually a far better predictor of whether the couple would still be dating several months later than the attitudes of students who had analyzed their relationship. Once again, the study found a disconnect between the things people could articulate and the things they actually felt. As numerous studies have found, when we are forced to analyze our preferences for everything from why we like someone to what food we prefer, the reasons we come up with only rarely have anything to do with the actual reasons. As Alexander Pope warned, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing—a warning that is particularly relevant when it comes to thinking about relationships, which are by their very nature complex and difficult to pin down.

  What all this should teach us is a certain humility about our own explanations, particularly if we do not have expertise in a particular area. While an art historian can easily provide an array of sophisticated reasons for the superiority of van Gogh to Dilbert, we non-art historians would be better off simply trusting our intuition. The same holds true for dating. Despite what we may think, the vast majority of us should not consider ourselves experts when it comes to relationships, no matter how great a blow that is to our own egos. We can go wrong in all sorts of ways. If someone fits the profile we think we are supposed to love, we may ignore how we actually feel. If our feelings conflict with some larger belief that we have (I could never love a smoker) or that the culture fosters (love should feel like X), we are likely to ignore our feelings and cling to the belief.

  All of this is especially true for women, who are more likely than men to spend time analyzing their relationships. No, I’m not being a chauvinist—studies have shown that women tend to analyze their romantic relationships much more than most men. One woman I interviewed said that when she had gotten serious about finding someone to marry, she and a girlfriend decided to meet for lunch to analyze every new candidate. While the lunches themselves proved enjoyable, they were no help at all when it came to her dating. Forced to state exactly why she should or shouldn’t keep seeing someone, she developed increasingly bizarre criteria. She realized things were getting out of hand when she found herself rejecting one man because his ears were too low on his head. She called off the lunches and now tries to curb her need to talk about her dates.

  Not only do we do a poor job of figuring out what is important to us about other people, we also don’t know ourselves nearly as well as we think. In one study, people were asked to describe how other people viewed them. The average correlation between how people thought they were viewed and how they were actually viewed was a distinctly lackluster 0.40 or so (one would mean perfect correlation, and zero would mean no correlation). So, for example, your view of how giving you are agrees only modestly with how giving your friends think you are—and chances are that your friends are closer to the truth. Other studies have confirmed that the people around us usually have a more accurate picture of our personality than we do, and they are also better at predicting how we will behave.

  This doesn’t mean that you should rely on these friends to tell you whether or not you should date someone (as we’ve just seen, there are some serious pitfalls to this approach), but it might not be a bad idea to get their help clarifying what will make you happy in a relationship. You may think that you don’t care very much about a certain quality, such as thoughtfulness, but your friend may be able to remind you of the intense frustration you have felt toward everyone who lacks that quality. You may also think that something is desperately important, while your friend can remind you that your last partner had that quality, and it didn’t make you any less unhappy. One woman admitted that she almost decided to end the relationship with the man she eventually married until one of her friends chided her for undervaluing the importance of kindness.

  YOU WORE RED—NO, I WORE BLUE. AH, YES, I REMEMBER IT WELL.

  Given all of this, it won’t come as any great surprise that our memory is not particularly reliable, either, and we are likely to recall events in a number of deeply inaccurate ways that have profound implications for dating. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize for his ingenious work on these issues, has discovered that we don’t remember an experience with equal intensity throughout. We tend to remember it at its most intense, and we tend to remember the end—what Kahneman has dubbed the “peak-end” rule. In a sign of just how far scientists are willing to go to understand this phenomenon, they did a study of men who underwent colonoscopy exams. Needless to say, having a tube with a camera (thank God for miniaturization!) inserted into your rectum and then being poked and prodded with it for several minutes is not a pleasant experience, and this unpleasantness is itself significant—people will skip regular testing to avoid it, despite the medical benefits. So, if doctors could find a way to make the experience less unpleasant, patients might be more willing to have the procedure. Researchers decided to take advantage of Kahneman’s peak-end rule. One group received the standard colonoscopy. The second group also received the standard colonoscopy with one twist (well, not a literal twist—that would be most uncomfortable). After the exam was over, the doctor left the scope in for a brief period of at least twenty seconds. Although still not enjoyable, those final moments were much less distressing than when the scope was being moved around. But the proof is in the, er, pudding. How did the extra time affect the patients? Kahneman’s theory held true: the second group remembered the experience as less unpleasant and were more likely to agree to follow-up colonoscopies than the first group.

  Your average date is, I hope, much more pleasant than your average colonoscopy, but Kahneman’s peak-end rule does provide some easy advice. Try to make sure that the date includes at least one really intense moment of happiness. That will be the moment your date will remember. And whatever you do, end the date on a high note. That will color your date’s memory of the entire experience.

  BEWARE EXPECTATIONS

  Our experience is not only hostage to our slippery memory—it’s also powerfully shaped by the expectations we bring with us. Even something as fundamental as how we taste food is remarkably susceptible to manipulation based on our expectations. You only need to look at Brian Wansink’s brilliant work as the director of the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab. He has done a number of clever studies at the Spice Box, a laboratory that masquerades as a restaurant. In one experiment, he offered diners a free glass of Cabernet Sauvignon—but with one devious alteration. Although all the diners were given a glass of a wine known as Two-Buck Chuck (the nickname tells you the price), half of them were told that they were being served wine from a new California label, while the other half were told that they were getting a glass of North Dakota’s finest. Even though they drank the same wine, their expectations radically shaped their experience. Not only did those diners who thought they were drinking North Dakotan wine rate their wine as tasting bad, they also rated their food as worse than the other group. In fact, it altered their entire meal. They ended up eating less and leaving the restaurant sooner.

  The power of expectations is so great that it has an almost preternatural ability to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. In one study, after a test was given to all the students in an elementary school, a few students were randomly selected, and the teachers were told that these students had scored so highly on the test that they were sure to excel in the coming year. The parents and the students weren’t told about this so that the only difference was in the minds of the teachers. But just that small intervention led to a major difference. By the end of the year, the falsely anointed “exceptional” students showed significantly higher gains in their IQ scores than the other students. In other words, simply leading the teachers to believe that these students were special led those teachers to treat them in a way that ended up making them special.

  Experiments have demonstrated the same power of expectations for attraction. In one study, men and women were ask
ed to talk on the phone and get acquainted with an unknown member of the opposite sex. Before the conversation, each man was given a photograph of his supposed partner. The actual photograph was randomly selected from a group that was either attractive or unattractive. The women were not given photographs. Then, the couples spoke on the phone for roughly ten minutes about anything they wanted. Men who had received photos of beautiful women spoke to the women in a way that caused the women to be friendlier and more flirtatious—acting for all intents and purposes as beautiful women, regardless of their actual appearance.

  In The Psychology of Human Conflict, Edwin Guthrie tells a remarkable story of how one college woman was transformed in real life by a similar experiment. A group of college men chose a shy, socially inept student and decided to treat her as if she were one of the most popular girls at the school. They made sure she was invited to the right parties and always had men asking her to dance and generally acted as if they were lucky to be in her company. Before the school year had ended, her behavior had completely changed. She was more confident and came to believe that she was indeed popular. Even after the men ended their experiment (although without telling her anything about it), she continued to behave with self-assurance. But here is the really amazing part—even the men who “conducted” the experiment came to see her in the same way, so fully had her demeanor been transformed. If only someone would secretly hire the people around us to treat us not as we are but as we wish to be, we might all become the people we aspire to be.

  HOW FALLING IN LOVE IS LIKE WINNING THE LOTTERY—BUT NOT IN THE WAY THAT YOU THINK

  The point of all of this is not to befuddle you—befuddling though the working of the mind often is. Some people might read this chapter and be tempted to redouble their efforts to impose some sort of rationality on their dating, but I believe that is exactly the wrong response. If anything, all of this information should teach us to trust our intuition more and our conscious mind less. And we should also remember that the tricks our minds play on us are not necessarily a bad thing for our love lives. For example, being in a relationship appears to lessen how attractive we find other people. In one study, male students in a relationship judged unknown women 10 percent less attractive than single men did. Being in a relationship also causes us to exaggerate our partner’s good qualities. In another study, 95 percent of people claimed that their partner was above average in appearance, intelligence, warmth, and sense of humor.

  Regardless, the vagaries of our minds when it comes to everything from predicting how something will make us feel in the future to remembering how something made us feel in the past should generate a certain amount of skepticism for one of the central claims of the romantic story line—that finding Mr. or Ms. Right will solve all of our problems and make us happy. If you don’t believe me, then you need to consider what I like to call the parable of the lottery winner and paraplegic, which reveals that no single thing affects our happiness as much as we think it will. There are numerous studies confirming this, ranging from college students predicting how they would feel if their football team lost to professors predicting how unhappy they would be if they failed to get tenure. But let’s go right to the starkest evidence imaginable. I’m going to ask you a simple question: would it bring you more happiness to win the lottery or to become a paraplegic? No doubt, this is an astoundingly easy choice. Equally astounding, though, is how little the difference is between these choices when you measure people’s long-term happiness.

  At the moment people first learn their fates, of course, the contrast could not be greater. Lottery winners are ecstatic and often think that all of their problems have been solved, while paraplegics face a level of despair that is difficult for most of us to imagine. But over time, even the best and the worst of events get woven into the fabric of our daily lives. According to more than one study, lottery winners are no happier than people in general. One study compared people who had won anywhere from $50,000 to $1 million in a state lottery with a group of nonwinners. Not only were the winners no happier than the nonwinners, researchers found that many everyday activities, such as watching television or talking with a friend, were no longer as enjoyable for the winners as they were for the nonwinners. What about the paraplegics? Surely, they were significantly unhappier than the average person. But another study revealed that their level of happiness was only slightly lower than it had been before their loss.

  No matter how important something is at the moment, we always tend to overestimate how long it will stay with us. Psychologists call this the “durability bias.” This holds true even for our relationships. A recent study has shown that people were less upset by breakups than they had predicted they would be. The reason for this is that most of us fail to factor in the positive experiences we will continue to have in the future, regardless of the breakup. Studies have also found that people recover even from bereavement fairly quickly, especially if they can find meaning in the loss. Researchers have discovered that people have a certain set point for happiness, a level that they may stray from briefly when a major event occurs, such as winning the lottery or getting married, but that they generally return to and remain at for most of their lives. Just how quickly do we return to our set points? Usually less than three months. In other words, finding “the one” simply isn’t as important as the romantic story line tells us it is.

  At the very least, I hope this chapter has made you more aware of the different ways that we are unconsciously influenced, even when it comes to something as fundamental as romantic attraction. That’s not to say that any of us are soon going to become the rational creatures we imagine ourselves to be. But at least we can be a little more conscious of the dark recesses of our mind that so often waylay us on the road to love.

  2

  The Dating Animal

  What I Learned About Dating from Darwin

  THE FOLLOWING PAGES ARE NOT FOR THE FAINT OF heart. If there is one part of this book that strikes at the very root of the romantic story line, this is it. Based largely on the work of evolutionary psychologists, it shows us not as we wish we were but as we are. What it reveals is the ceaseless struggle between men and women in which dating is a battleground filled with deception and infidelity.

  To accept the evolutionary point of view, we must first set aside our natural prejudice that each of us is a unique individual unlike any other. This is undoubtedly true in lots of small ways, but for now we are going to focus on human beings not as individuals but as a species. In truth, the amount of genetic variation among humans is quite small. And although myriad cultures shape us in vastly different ways, evolutionary psychologists look for traits that are shared across cultures, humanity in the aggregate rather than the particular. Evolutionary psychology is predicated on the idea that our thoughts and feelings and behavior—often lumped together under the banner of “human nature”—have been decisively shaped by the challenges our ancestors faced over the last several million years. In fact, if we truly adopt an evolutionary perspective, we are no longer even the main actors in our own stories but simply the puppets of our genes, which are the true units of consequence.

  Accepting this premise will be more difficult than you might imagine. When confronted with evolutionary explanations for their actions, most people deny that those explanations have anything to do with their behavior. For example, if a man sleeps with a lot of women, and you suggest that he is doing that in order to increase the number of his offspring, he will point to the fact that he uses condoms and has no intention of impregnating any of the women. On a conscious level, he will be right. Only it doesn’t explain why he feels driven to sleep with so many women or why he is willing to expend so much time and energy and money to do that. Below the level of conscious thought lies a deep and instinctual desire in men for a variety of female sexual partners. There is a very good evolutionary reason for that desire—the more women he has sex with, the more opportunities he has to pass along his genes to future generatio
ns. And it is this unconscious level that we are interested in.

  When you start to look at things from an evolutionary point of view, this kind of disconnect between conscious and unconscious explanations is common. Our culture evolves at a much faster rate than our biology. We are perpetually caught in what you might call an evolutionary time lag. Much of what constitutes our most fundamental drives and instincts developed hundreds of thousands of years ago to deal with the challenges of living in the grassy savanna of Africa. But the fact that our lives no longer resemble those of our prehistoric ancestors doesn’t mean that we have also discarded that evolutionary heritage. So, for now, we need to explore the law of the jungle to get a better understanding of just what goes on between men and women.